April 2007

30 April 2007

Dion Hinchcliffe has been quoted several times in my blog and is the editor of the AJaX book I wrote a couple of chapters with Jay Fienberg in. (But look! Amazon gives me the props!)

In Dion's blog, he is famous for creating detailed graphics that often are like a Richard Scarry book for Web 2.0 geeks. I've always rather liked them, even though they do break the rule of graphics: "Immediately understandable". I've gotten around this by telling myself that they are conceptual schematics.

Information Architect and Data Visualization Powerhouse Michal Migurski goes through a series of Dion's graphics and supplies minimal commentary. Michal, who has just the most gorgeous blog design, doesn't really take Dion to the woodshed. He could have been really mean. Rather, he provides minimal commentary and assumes people will already know his peeves.

This is an excellent opportunity to see an information architect complain about something, AND get to see a bunch of Dion's graphics in a gallery. Study them and you'll learn a lot about Web 2.0 and how some designers don't like to see information presented. The best of both worlds!

29 April 2007

I've been musing about the relationships between constructed spaces and information spaces. These musings have focused on what happens in spaces (design, use, flexibility, etc.) but what happens between spaces is equally important. How do we get from place to place in the built environment and how do we do it on the Internet?

In Urban Planning, we discuss connectivity a lot. It's a difficult issue that often runs face to face with other issues like transportation, private property, and environmentalism. Connectivity, like is sounds, is about making things connected.

For people, our perception of our world is how we interpret our world. If something looks far away or seems hard to get to, then it is.

Here's an example. Before the creation of I-5, the East Lake and Boston neighborhoods of Seattle were connected. You could easily walk from place to place. After I-5, they were highly separated. Now getting from "Start" above in Eastlake to my "Finish" in the Boston neighborhood is very difficult.

The path above (sorry it's purple, I couldn't make it change) shows driving directions from Start to Finish. You basically drive away from Finish, towards it for a while, away from it again and then towards it. Your trip from Start to Finish is roughly 5 times the actual distance between the two points.

On foot, you can walk underneath the freeway (always a pleasant experience) because it is open.

So we cut off roughly half of the automotive trip there. Notice the scale of the large apartment complex in the lower left. The Freeway is even larger. So even walking under the freeway is a barrier. It's loud, dirty and scary.

But we are determined to make it to finish. If we were law abiding citizens, we'd finish the trip as Google had drawn it. This is the end of our "legal" shortcuts.

You've heard of folksonomy? Well there's also folksography. This is where people popularly create livable and usable spaces out of barriers in the built environment.

Here we can clearly see a trail up the side of the hill to our destination.

So, the built environment gave us a series of impediments that we were able to force our way through to get to our objective.

But people most often drive. Why? Because we don't like to force our way through to our objectives. The perception of the barriers (the dark scary freeway and cutting through people's back yards) makes us uneasy. So people tend not to do it.

Perhaps more important, this route has no real coherence. That 8 block walk would be easy in downtown. The cityscape there is coherent. One block leads to the next with clear demarcations for people and vehicles. Our presence on the sidewalk is socially accepted. We don't have to fight for our right to be there.

In this trip above, you move from Start to Finish through wildly different settings and crossing social barriers. These elements add to our perception of the distance from start to finish. Even though we were able to eliminate the physical barriers that made the car trip longer, we weren't able to eliminate the psycho-social barriers of the shorter trip.

Relating to the Internet

If we were to think of Start and Finish as ideas on the Internet, their proximity might also be seen as their relevance. So they are close to each other and therefore, pretty relevant. The purple line could therefore be seen as finding your way from them using a search engine like Google.

Search Engines

Google is a guessing machine that takes your very vague input and tries to provide something relevant. It's pretty good. Even though the driving route from Start to Finish was visually circuitous, it could have also totally left Seattle and gone to Greece and come back again.

From a global perspective it's a really short trip.

Much of the traffic to my blog is from search engines. Here's some recent searches that have led people to me (courtesy of 103bees):

This shows is a hodgepodge of relevance or coherence. People using Google to search for stuff end up at my blog in their search for what the Internet is fond of calling "relevance". But what is relevant is not necessary coherent or in context.

So we see people looking for things like a "For One More Day Torrent". This is because I have a review of Mitch Albom's For One More Day in the left bar of this blog and a few posts on Torrents.

But worse yet, if I say something like "Neck Spasm" or worse yet, link to "Neck Spasms" then in the future I become more relevant to the search term Neck Spasms while having very little actually to do with Neck Spasms.

So search engines are a great way to find irrelevant relevance. But we use them every day. Why? Because there have historically been few alternatives. Search Engines provide the Internet with a base layer of connectivity.

Focused Sites

There are sites that try to focus better than a generalized search engine. These include things like Techmeme, Google News and Megite. The image below is from Techmeme.

The level of real relevance here is very high. But the topics are dictated. This is not a bad thing. I read Techmeme every day. It's a powerful pulse point for the technical community. I have been fortunate to find myself quoted there frequently.

Techmeme and sites like it use a combination of automated techniques and human intervention to comb the Internet for events and create coherence and context. All the articles above directly deal with the same topic and, most often, cross-quote.

A post like this is unlikely to make it into Techmeme, because it doesn't fall into the Techmeme formula. Techmeme is most often looking for items of innovation in Technology, be that a the release of a new product, an event (like the one above) that may have repercussions in how products are used or perceived, or an event that has some impact in the tech blogging social sphere.

This isn't a bad thing, in fact you could argue it's good. Techmeme is creating coherence by having a coherent content generation model.

The good news here is that as information travelers, we can use Techmeme to easily find a meme and follow it.

Social Bookmarking

As we found things through Google that were relevant but not in context, oddly social bookmarking can give us the opposite. We get irrelevant things in context.

Here we see (with one obvious exception) things that are in context for business. However, none of these things have much to do with each other.

I can click around here and find some things I wasn't expecting. For example, I do appreciate the fact that the Y Combinator neo-VC site greets you by telling you to wake up.

Folksonomies are great for highly specialized tags that you share in a relatively small group or for highly generalized tags that you want to surf for happy accidents, like my finding Y Combinator just now.

But happy accidents don't make coherent informationscapes.

So the more general the keyword in a social tool like del.icio.us, the less relevant the information will be.

Here are all the things tagged "GrandIsland". Grand Island is not a very interesting tag. But it is enough to get a few things. But we see here 1/3 is dealing with Cancun. 2/3rds are dealing with Grand Island, Nebraska.

So this tag, even though it was not saturated like "business", still has a relatively low amount of relevance in the articles tagged.

For that you need a focused group of individuals with a fairly good overlap in what a tag means to them.

Here with the tag "socialmedia" we have a long list of highly relevant and in-context information. The group of people who would know to tag "socialmedia" is small and fairly well focused.

I follow this tag often in much the same way I follow Techmeme. It's a powerful tag with a high degree of coherence.

But there's an accessibility issue here. How do people know to look for certain tags? Especially when "social media" is two words in real life but "socialmedia" on del.icio.us?

The more on-topic a tag is likely to be, the more esoteric it seems to be. The less esoteric, the more it is open to spamming or misuse.

Direct Links

Direct links are currently the best of all possible worlds for creating context and coherence. It is rare that someone will link to something completely unrelated to what they are talking about. So while reading an article on brain surgery, you are generally likely to find very coherent links.

The problem? Most sites that deal with serious topics like health issues are unlikely to link to other sites. For example, Webmd.com has great blogs and discussion groups that it links to - but they are all internal.

It's a nice place to start your search for medical issues, but it often won't give you someone local to go have coffee with and chat about your situation.

So direct links are good, when they exist. But they are rarely there when you need them and are even more seldomly comprehensive.

An Inconnective Truth

Both the Internet and our built environment suffers from lack of conceptual coherence. There are no easy conceptual threads to follow through the hodgepodge of information uses on the net. We build trails for ourselves in the forms of direct links and tagging, but direct links are poorly maintained trails and tagging can end up arterials congested by traffic and bad drivers.

Perhaps this is indicative of human beings in general. Perhaps the way we settle physically, mirrors how we think, and this in turn translates to the Internet. We are highly a highly disorganized species that conceives of itself as organized. A race of faulty pattern-matchers staring out at chaos.

In our cities we have also seen that over-planning creates the mundane. How often do people take a trip to Overland Park, Kansas compared to a trip to Kansas City?

My goal here isn't to tame the Internet, but to perhaps start a conversation about how to better navigate it. The best cities on earth (London, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Paris, New York, Montreal) all have been built to navigate via a wide variety of means (subway, cab, bus, walking, car, etc.).

The net has these too. You might take the Google to a blog where you'll find a link and follow that to a tag which takes you to a list of links from which you select a few and find a great thread that you spend the day with.

My questions that arise from this include:

Are our current search options enough?

Are our current search techniques enough?

How can we create social media tags that retain coherence?

Is there something beyond direct linking?

Are self-imposed tags like we use in Technorati useful?

Can we create social-threading?

How can the "conversation" be truly two way?

How can we make explicit the differences between context and relevance?

27 April 2007

After three years of J. LeRoy's Evolving Web being called that and looking like it did, I have made a few alterations that I'm hoping will make it more readable.

1. Since Google Analytics tells me that about 2.96% of my visitors had 800x600 screens, I have made the middle section 100 pixels larger - making longer posts not take up 10 screens or so.

2. I have de-J.LeRoyized the interface to stop confusing people who thought I was a musician or not Jim Benson or whatever. I got a lot of confusion out of all that.

3. I have shaded the sidebars a pleasing (I hope) color to differentiate them from the main content.

4. I have gotten rid of the Amazon javascript and pictures for 2006 books, as well as 2005. They remain for the current year. This should speed up the experience for people using Safari or some Linux browsers which went berzerk with all the Javascript.

5. I have moved things around to be a little (just a little) more logical. So I have moved the subscription links to the left side, gotten rid of the two extras and just left the e-mail subscription and the Feedburner links. Most of the services today auto-sense anyway.

6. I've added a periwinkle glow to clickable images in the sidebars. Because we all need a periwinkle glow.

7. I've added a potentially bitchin' new masthead which features the screened back images of me and my wife (from a picture taken in our car while waiting for a ferry).

What I did not yet add:

I want to better differentiate block quotes in my posts, but the Typepad CSS editor is well-meaning but confusing.

What this all means:

The blog is now easier to read and most of the things about it that annoyed me are gone. But I'd like YOU to tell me if it's better.

I have lots of people subscribing to my feeds. Roughly 80% of my readers do not actually visit the web site. Right now you are probably reading this in e-mail or in a screen reader. Well, click on this link to go see how nifty the blog looks. Do it!

26 April 2007

Under a business-friendly Mozilla Public License, Flex is now open source. The Flex Press Release says:

“Open source co-creation is a powerful way to build a strong development community,” said James Governor, Founder of RedMonk. “Adobe's decision to open source the Flex SDK is a radical move which should attract a new class of developer to the platform.”

What we're seeing is a shift of differentiating between a platform and an application. If you create a platform and want it to be successful, there is a need for a large developer community. That community needs to experiment. Experiments are best done on the cheap.

One of the major issues one has with closed source environments is that bug fixes come slowly. Flex, as the Scoble video points out, will have daily builds of the new open source Flex SDK. Try to get that out of Microsoft.

It seems likely that we'll be developing both Silverlight and Flex / Apollo applications simultaneously at Gray Hill. I hope to have some of our developers guest post here to say how they are going.

25 April 2007

I'm not sure if this is due to a change at Google, but I've noticed a strong upsurge in search traffic finding its way to my category pages. Each just gets a few hits a day. This has been going on for a month or so. If I go back about six weeks, I received one or two visitors a day to all my category pages combined.

24 April 2007

At one point today I was having a conference call about marketing opportunities, chatting with a client about a transportation software project, chatting with another client about a social media project, describing something going on with Cooperation Commons, and reading an incoming e-mail about Interra and WISER Commons coding.

While my brain could keep track of these things, my fingers became utterly confused and kept trying to send replies to one person when they were meant to the other, or mindlessly switching between two screens when I really wanted a third.

I went through digit overload there. And what does someone like me do in this situation? Writes on the white board to remember to blog the experience.

22 April 2007

Jake Olsen, CTO over at Platial, (whom I was mean to this morning) had a post that I meant to respond to last week and utterly forgot.

In Twitter, Jake managed to get himself listed as a friend of himself. Which makes Jake wonder "How the hell did I do that?"

This is high on my list of things about Twitter that I really hate. I really hate that the navigation is non-existent. I hate that I can't search for people on it worth a damn.

You can't find people on twitter. You just have to know where they are.

You can't thread. You can't squelch certain people.

But now, at least you have the gift of being able to have a good self image by liking yourself.

Scoble says that we should use things like Twitterific and other clients - effectively making twitter a message conduit and not an actual application.

I'm mulling that one over.

What I like about Twitter is that they are taking seriously the rule that if you make an open-ended system, people will find interesting ways to use it. So I'm not a total Twitter-hater. I'm just a Twitter annoyed-by.

Here we have a scene from Akira Kurosawa's Ran. It's a pivotal scene. As you can tell, something is about to happen.

As someone who doesn't speak Japanese, I would have no clue. But thankfully I have subtitles.

Oh No! What crazy person would so totally cover up the action with this "information"?! Do they realize that what is happening on the screen is vital to understanding the text?

Well, this is why I haven't been posting to my food blog for a while. Here's platial when zooming in on a location.

We're zooming into a restaurant in Bellevue, Washington. We want to know some information about it, so we click on the o/8 link.

Oh No! Just like covering up the context in the movie, Platial is covering up the spatial context of the post. The big box may as well say, "It is now time for me to cut this delicious food with the knife I have here in my hand!"

For the last few weeks I've been thinking about what I can do about this. Unfortunately, Platial was a very unique application, incorporating many of my seven elements of human understanding. It mapped, it tagged, and it had blog-like chronology in its posting.

The Platial people have put a lot of work into their pop-up information viewer, so I feel bad being overly negative. I've spent a while trying to come up with a positive spin for it, but it so obstructs the spatial context for the site that, for me, it doesn't work any more.

20 April 2007

My friend (whom I haven't seen in too long) Karen, blogged about Joshua Bell's recent stunt / performance / thought food in the Washington DC subways. It turns out the Washington Post wanted to see if people would take the time to notice one of the world's best violinists violinning with a 300 year old violin at the entrance to a subway station.

Karen was nice enough not to be a spoiler, but I'm not. No one stopped to listen for more than 60 seconds.

There are a million lessons we could learn, arguments we could have, and so forth, about this particular event. People don't notice beauty. People are cretins. People are rude. People are overworked. People are focused on timelines and not their surroundings. And they're all true.

But they're also all kinda not the point.

Joshua Bell was out of context. His violin playing in the subway was seen by people as someone who couldn't play professionally busking for change.

Even if they did know, most people would be like "Hey, that's that violin dude, but I gotta 10:15 meeting."

There are many things that make this a not-quite-fair test.

1. He was playing in an entry hall with no comfortable place to stop

2. The entry hall was not designed to be a place to lounge

3. The entry hall was at the most frantic spot in any journey - the entry to changing modes.

4. The entry hall was a closed area that most people would only be in for a few seconds anyway.

I've written before about talking dog syndrome. When I walk into a Cantonese restaurant or am in Hong Kong, 5 times out of 10 native Cantonese speakers stare at me for a few minutes - trying to figure out what kind of weird English I'm speaking. It might take a few minutes to get through to them that I'm actually speaking Cantonese.

Joshua Bell in the entry hall to a subway station is going to be similar. It would take a few minutes to soak in and when it did people may react. But no one was there for a few minutes. Joshua Bell was a Violin Playing Dog.

The unexpected is unexpected because we don't expect it. Joshua Bell was not a violent enough anomaly to make people take notice. If Joshua Bell were, say, Donald Trump hopping up and down naked screaming "You're Fired! You're Fired!" Then, believe me, people would notice.

Naked Donald Trumps are (thankfully) highly unexpected and visibly obvious. Joshua Bell's playing the violin - not so much.

This shows us that context is largely a function of expectations. People coming out of the subway fully expected someone to be busking at the entrance. Therefore, his presence was interpreted in that light. They had neither the time nor the inclination to say, "Ahh, the 8th busker I've seen today, I'd better loiter about and see if he might be very famous!"

For the rest of us, though, this shows that our expectations can sometimes rob us from opportunities. It does pay to keep your eyes open, to appreciate what we might find (even if it isn't Joshua Bell), and enjoy.